


Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me

by stephanericher



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Star Wars: A New Hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 00:09:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17415194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: So much has been said and written about grief.





	Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pearwaldorf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearwaldorf/gifts).



> warnings: canon major character death/associated feelings
> 
> title is from the poem "kaddish" by allen ginsberg
> 
> i didn't consult too heavily with the wiki, so it might not be strictly adherent to canon. i hope you like it!

So much has been said and written about grief. So many words, in so many languages, falling from tongues graceful but without real comfort, more for the benefit of the person who says them than the intended audience. Personal words, brought to life in a Holonet drama or in the back pages of a book, words that Leia has read before and felt anger (nothing like her grief at all) or acceptance (it traces back to the same place). Words, spoken, controlled, by people like her, but much older, who have lived long enough to know this is coming but so long that it’s so hard to let go. The mast of a boat, clung to by a tangled rope, wires soldered to a burnt-out motherboard. Like her, a vine around a tree but the tree is suddenly vaporized, and yet she does not know how not to hold her shape around the nothing.

She knows how to mourn, but there is now no one to expect things, to gently guide her. There is no one instructing her in tradition. Her father is not there to gently remind her what to say; her mother cannot express approval of Leia’s outfit or hairstyle. She dresses herself, alone, presents herself to no one before she steps out to work.

Her father was there when she was born. He has told this story to Leia many times, how she had cried and whimpered, fallen asleep as they’d taken off on the _Tantive IV_ , her small cross-eyed face looking out the viewport as Alderaan had come into view. Leia had fallen asleep to it as a child, when she’d still been confident that her father would always be there. It was unfathomable that he wouldn’t be, even when he’d begun to be so caught up in senate business and rebellion business, even when she’d begun to wade into politics herself.

So much has been said about Leia’s father. From people here, who didn’t know her mother well enough, did not know the names of her friends, did not know the gardens and hallways in the palace, the streets, the feeling of being inside Leia’s mother’s closet. Her parents’ hands, one each in hers, when they could both envelop hers two or three times over. Still bigger, the last time she’d held them.

Leia is not the only one hurting, not the only Alderaanian, nor the only person who has lost someone in this war. She is not the only person to have lost Bail Organa, but she cannot possibly articulate the way it feels to anyone here. It’s not because she is (was, really, now) royalty, or because of the weight of what she symbolizes, the weight of her parents’ legacies. They cannot possibly know or feel—they have all lost, but it’s all different—she is alone.

She is surrounded by her father, a life interrupted, his old droids and his old clothes, datapads with files edited in his messy scrawl on the touchscreen, reminders that Bail Organa was once here, walked the halls of this ship, firm steps and the swish of a cloak. Words that will soon be overwritten, files that will soon be overwritten as plans and technology change. Equipment that will be replaced, clothes thrown away as the rebellion moves, everything lost. Things that bring little comfort now.

Leia closes her eyes, curled up on a bunk, and tries to pretend that it is her bed at home, that she’ll hear those heavy footsteps again, padding steady across the floor, her father’s hand pulling the covers up to tuck her in. No more, never again. His arms will not fill out the arms of the jacket that rests on the seat back. He will never pour her a cup of caf, and then in the same motion pour one for her mother.

Her mother will never laugh and tell him not to show off. The windows in that hall have been vaporized, and the sun shines through only blank space where Alderaan was.

People have written countless words on grief, people of peoples of flesh and blood and bone, droids and cyborgs, sentient beings on countless planets and moons and ships. But grief is infinite, spinning like the edges of the universe, expanding constantly at a rate that she cannot wrap her head around. This will never go away—her parents will never meet anyone she might marry, never meet friends and companions and colleagues and children. And those people will never meet her parents. A door shut, a part of herself that she can’t explain, but that has always fallen into place when she has introduced people, or when people have realized she’s Bail and Breha’s daughter, a gap that cannot be crossed.

It’s nothing genetic—and Leia has mourned her birth parents, quietly, but this is different, the loss of something quite real and tangible versus a road that was not taken. Though, truthfully, Leia cannot imagine having been someone else’s daughter, even if it had to end like this. Even if she can see no way out, no way for her to have gone into the room with Tarkin and Vader and come out with a planet intact (she should have told Antilles to make the jump before she’d even had the data in her hands, sent R2 off with the message just as they’d dropped out of hyperspace and then gone back, delayed Vader onboard somehow).

Her father had told her, many times, that hypotheticals were of no use other than for the future. What we can do better next time, we will do then. We cannot redo the past. The future seems, sometimes, almost not to matter, but Leia can barely let herself think it in a sentence. Her parents would be ashamed—the rebellion they risked their lives for, lost them for, that they’d told her she could join only if she were prepared to risk it all. Leia had thought she was.

This was never part of the bet she’d slid across the table, but there it was, in Tarkin’s despicable hands, won and spent.

Her parents would be so angry with her for half-considering giving it up, throwing the future away, throwing them away. There is no other way to honor them than to continue walking the narrowing path, the walls closing in on Leia like the trash compactor back in the Death Star. But, again, she will pull herself out of the filth.

She will grieve, even if she cannot mourn them properly, treat their bodies as she should, as their daughter. She will carry the weight of Alderaan, because that is what was decided, when her father first took her in his arms and showed her a planet she could not yet comprehend.

Tears do not symbolize weakness. Just because they are not appropriate for the senate floor does not mean they make one weak. Leia’s father had told her that so many times, when she’d tried to hold her tears back in front of him. She doesn’t want anyone to see her red eyes, even though grieving in this way may be expected of her. This grief is hers; these tears are hers.


End file.
